Wolcott on the right wing attacks on Juan Cole!

[Inland]

Two of my favorite bloggers--Wolcott and Juan Cole--together as Wolcott raises the shameful McCarthyite smearing Cole is getting for having the audacity to KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND TO SHARE IT WITH US. Yale is looking at Cole and the right wing neocons are looking to punish him for being right while they ruined the country. Cole deserves a medal, not blacklisting.
(please read Professor Cole's blog for All Things Iraq at www.juancole.com)

**********************
http://www.jameswolcott.com/

John Fund vs. Juan Cole
Posted by James Wolcott
I know whose side I'm on. It's really no contest, as Justin Raimondo lays out in his Antiwar column. In one corner, a distinguished scholar and a tireless educator via his inestimable blog. In the other, a dissembling ferret.

Fund has been using the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to whisk up a froth of hysteria over the admittance of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former Taliban supporter and Mullah Omar's roving international ambassador, into the student body of Yale. Now Yale is considering recruiting Juan Cole into the faculty as a professor of Middle East studies, which has Fund's beady eyes ablaze and the warbloggers in one of their impotent uproars. As Raimondo explains, the debacle in Iraq has made the War Party desperate for a scalp, any scalp, a neck, any neck.

"Back before the war ever began, Norman Podhoretz warned his fellow neocons that the campuses could once again become a fulcrum of antiwar dissent, the genesis of a movement that would gain enough momentum to make Washington think twice before committing us to a campaign to build an American empire in the Middle East. We would lose our nerve, just like we did in Vietnam – which, he averred, was 'a popular war'(italics in original) – and the forces of 'anti-Americanism,' symbolized by Susan Sontag and other villains, would triumph. The clear implication being that if we allowed these academic types to get out of hand, history would repeat itself in a resounding defeat on the home front – although, Poddy admitted, much depends on how well (or badly) the military aspect of the campaign in Iraq turns out.

"It turned out very badly indeed, and so the War Party is starved for a victory – even if it has to be a vicarious one over Hashemi or Cole...

"The neocons are backed into a corner: their policy is a bloody and damned expensive failure, and their own ranks are thinned by defections and demoralization. Yet still these shrikes are shrieking for more victims, their shrillness piercing the air with a call to purge the universities of 'treason.' Professional witch-hunters like David Horowitz, the ex-Commie-turned-neocon who aspires to be the arbiter of a new form of government-enforced political correctness, have turned this effort into a rising new industry and a source of employment for a whole generation of slanderers and sleaze-balls, who make a living sliming their betters.

***************

[smoogatz]

1. Cole has committed the grave sin of being right

while the fatuous neochump nitbrains have been wrong, wrong, wrong every step of the way. Therefore, Cole must be pilloried. How dare he use his superior knowledge and reasoning powers to make our Pretzledent look bad! Why does he hate the troops!?!?!?!

[Inland]

2. Nothing so irks them.

If you're wrong and on their side, it's a medal. If you are right and not on their side, it's the politics of personal destruction. Poor Prof. Cole. Because he's right about so many things, they are going to nuke him and his carreer.